Dan Plays Games 10

I really need to make an index for these. 

 

Forward Escape the Fold

Previous game of the Pyrene devs. A simple roguelite where you have a 3-wide column of cards laid out in each level full of monsters / items / potions / etc, but you can only ever move forward (straight or diagonal). The art is nice, but doesn’t feel like it has a particularly strong identity beyond a light dusting of vibes (Pyrene does much better in this regard.). While enjoyable to play for a few rounds, the gameplay loop and lightweight progression system didn't really grip me.

Asbury Pines

Idle game with a generations-spanning murder mystery plot at the center. I normally stay away from idle games because they play like hell with my ADHD (this one did too, but it seems some later patches have addressed this), but the narrative focus on this one got me to check it out and I was pleased with the experience. Being able to follow characters for decades and then having to spend time with them because of the nature of the idle elements was really effective at getting me attached to the cast. I wanted to see things turn out well, but then so-and-so dies for stupid or tragic or avoidable reasons and time keeps on going. I think the final arc and ending were a bit weak, but I was still invested even then. It does an extremely good job of letting the time scales sink in, where you will find yourself thinking of characters you liked generations or even centuries ago but never really in a way where you resent their absence, since the current batch of characters give you equal insight into the trials and tribulations of their lives.

Also, despite being an idle game murder mystery, there are Civ-style tech trees for civic, religious, and scientific advancement, and religion unlock #2 is "giant ground sloth cult" - a thing that has no concrete archaeological evidence for its existence (to my knowledge), but has non-zero odds of having existed. Do with that what you will.

Dungeon Encounters

A sort of minimum-viable dungeoncrawler, stripped down to the absolute bare bones - I don’t think that’s a good thing.

There’s no real story outside of a couple short paragraphs for each party member; your characters’ only stats are HP and equipment points; Special abilities are unlocked and applied on the party level, so character builds or specializations don’t really exist; there are no battle items and none plus one (max health boost) outside of fights; the only variables in weapons or magic are 1-target vs multi-target, set damage vs random damage, and if it can hit flying enemies or not; the dungeon has basically no interactivity besides some hidden treasures; equipment drops from enemies are extremely rare; there is no auto-explore function despite the dungeon being mostly empty, featureless hallways; there is supposedly some way to speed up the battles but I was unable to find it; the default keyboard controls are never-before-witnessed levels of intuitive.

The end result of the experiment is primarily tedium. There are threats that can wipe you easily in ways that seem unfair compared to other games (a thief enemy can put you into massive debt if you get hit), but there are likewise easy ways to completely negate those threats (I got a passive skill early on that just gives my party total immunity to poison). There are multiple enemy abilities that can just remove a character from your party if they hit, and you’re stuck on a tedious journey to get them back or find a replacement. Movement abilities plus being able to identify what monsters are in an encounter before the fight starts mean that by the time you hit dungeon level 25 you can avoid basically all the tough fights if you want to. If you party wipe, you have to start with level 1 characters and can’t even use the good loot you’ve unlocked and have to grind out THE ENTIRE THING AGAIN. 

The best quality it possesses is, in some moments, you can play it on autopilot and not think about it, and if that’s what you’re after I’m certain there are much better games to scratch the itch.

Nuclear Throne

Picked it back up after many years away, thanks to the recent 10 year anniversary patch. I’m still absolutely terrible at the game - like truly, remarkably dogshit at it - but it's still got the sauce. I’d call it one of the perfect games; nothing needs added, nothing needs removed. The machine gun thumps like a bass drum and it just feels good to play.

Ye Guild Clerk

Short freebie, you play as a clerk for an adventuring guild, giving people missions and seeing how that works out for them. Takes maybe half an hour to complete, though all the adventurers can end the game positive or negative with you so there’s a replay in there if you dig it. I can easily imagine an expanded version.

Neon White

GOTTA. GO. FAST. 

It doesn’t matter one bit if you don’t care about the mid/late-aughts Deviantart-core narrative or are super-duper competitive with the speedrunning element: there’s a skip button and the progression gates are easily overcome. There are character-based bonus levels you can unlock but again, skip button means you can get right to the challenges if you don't care about the characters.

The difficulty of normal levels is self-imposed (how fast do you want to get?), which I think is an extremely good way of designing things. Also the soundtrack slaps.

Stackflow

Balatro, if it was Tetris. Still in early access but even with the small amount of content (and no metaprogression) I found myself playing and enjoying quite a bit. Tetris is Tetris and it’s difficult to go wrong with Tetris, and even with the limited number of special blocks and perks in the game at time of writing, it's still enough to keep me engaged for a solid amount of time. I do think it needs a good chunk more content to hang on for the long haul vs the many options for standard Tetris out there, though. The most recent update (0.10) came out between when I started and finished this review; while not particularly big, it is a step in the right direction. 

 

Monsters are Coming!: Rock and Road

I can’t really recommend this one, though I am sad to say it. It’s a perfectly servicable, functional game. You have a city that moves along a path at a set rate, you move your little guy around harvesting resources and fighting monsters, you expand your city, all that works on a moment to moment level.

The issue is that this is really all there is. There are unlocks, but none of the ones I have gotten have changed how I approached the game at all. The routes you can choose are differentiated by only a few variables and each run has a set-in-stone pacing due to the auto scrolling city. After you’ve done a handful of runs you've seen most of what the game has to offer.
 

 

Uncle Chop's Rocket Shop

A roguelite about being a four-eyed fox-headed cartoon man in a dumpy space station, fixing spaceships with only your in-universe manual to help you. I love this game's premise, I love its vibe, I love sitting down and rolling through some jobs. There's a fun sense of satisfaction of going from terribly confused to "oh I can do this module with no trouble at all." The game rewards player knowledge in the way that most TTRPGs can only dream of.

However: there are a handful of bullshit moments that yank me right out of the moment and set off the "it's time to take a break" notification. A certain amount of friction is to be expected, especially towards the end of a run, but these come as particularly jarring. 

• Reactor jobs can tank a run before you realize what the problem is (understandable and appropriate, so this isn't really a flaw, but it is a frustration point. You gotta remove that core NOW.)
• The faction endings introduce new and sometimes obtuse mechanics that don't always gel (Lawmakers in particular is absolutely miserable: you have to babysit a battlestation and keep the ammo topped off, but in order to move between the gun and the dispenser you have to take a single-person elevator that is also being used by the other crewmembers who are, in my unscientific opinion, the slowest motherfuckers to ever exist in this universe of base matter.
• The meteor shower hazard just makes ships catch on fire constantly (there's no buffer period, so a fire can start literally as soon as you finish putting out the last one) and can be completely negated with a cheap permanent upgrade (like you can probably afford it after your first one or two runs and then never have to deal with meteors again, which begs the question of why they are in the game.)

A more general issue is that the game has no manual save, and only autosaves after every day of work (normally three ships) - depending on how good you are and how complex the fix-it jobs are, you're looking at a substantial chunk of time that you have to devote to the game in one go - it's not a pick up and play a round while you're on break kind of game. I understand why (cuts down on save scumming), but it is still frustrating and leads me to pass it over in favor of other games.

Still, all that aside, it's a weird little game that provides a unique experience and I'd recommend it to anyone who thinks the concept sounds fun, because even with all the frustrations listed above it is fun. I've considered printing out a hard copy of the manual, just for giggles. Maybe as Mothership prop. No idea how you'd adapt the puzzles to Mothership, but....actually hold on to that.

(Speaking of Mothership - surprisingly relevant content despite the aesthetic. The cyborg hivemind is made of desperate people trying to escape debt, you're a "devotee" instead of an employee, there's an interplanetary treasure-hunting faction that's really just an MLM scheme sifting through garbage, stuff like that. It's good!) 

**

The Gameable Content Bonus 

Uncle Chop's ship module repair for tabletop

Spitballing here, gonna get loosey goosey for a moment. You give the players a print-out or pdf of the Uncle Chop's manual (or your own bespoke equivalent). Players do their thing until they need to fix a ship module. You tell them the symptoms / problem. Players then have to either find, replace, or build replacement parts to solve the puzzle. 

**

Ground Sloth Worship in Pleistocene North America (Corvee, Alan; 1992)

For Players: A brief text outlining Corvee's hypothesis that large swathes of the Midwest and Appalachia were dominated by the worship of giant ground sloths at the end of the Ice Age. While surprisingly restrained in tone for a text of this subject matter, even cursory examination of other sources reveals that Corvee's conclusions are not supported at all by mainstream archaeology.

For Handlers: The book is intended to plant the idea in the players' minds before revealing related evidence, rather than containing any direct Mythos material. It would work as a good trailhead or supplemental evidence for a plot involving Tsathoggua (sloth-god), the Voormis (sloth people), Clark Ashton Smith's Hyperborean material (reframed as the ice-age Americas, with "Hyperborea" coming from Greek mis-interpretation of the Book of Eibon), the K'n-Yani (who worship Tsathoggua and live under the Americas) and the assorted New-Age lore of Mount Shasta (Mount Voormithadreth, anyone?). Practically writes itself.

Slushpile 18

Tis the season, the season of slush.  I'm pretty sure this is the biggest one yet.

Slushpile Index

1. Salt in food has made it much harder for demons to possess people
2. The division of first beings into those who have no part in the world, those who devote all things to maintaining it, those who take an active role within it
3. A recurring question in medieval Christianity:  “Did Christ also die for the orcs?”
4. Trial by ordeal but it's just making the arrest: if she was actually an evil witch you'd be dead the moment you cross the property line, so no need to toss her in a lake.
5. The spell to turn one’s spirit into a banshee is a secret art of women - a practice of last-ditch defence against men who wish them harm.
6. The cult had fallen out of practice well before the arrival of the Four Prophets and the Epistles of Fire, and so very little information remains.
7. The Twelve Houses of Balosar
8. Oberon’s Tower hostel, just outside Lang-Mer’s Poor Gate.
9. Kona Hafhandsdottir - A sword for hire, from the northern fjordlands.
10. Makhan - A mendicant sword-priest from the lands beyond Prester John’s country.
11. “Here is one thing, there another. The stone has ten thousand teachers.”
12. Drow Ambassador: “Yes, yes, I’ve seen the cartoons. Your political comics are men of unparalleled creativity: who could have possibly imagined such witticisms as ‘foreigner bad’ or ‘woman stupid’? If that’s the best they can do I don't think they're paying much attention.”
13. Atlantida: volcanic island off the northern coast of Brazil. Former Portuguese colony.
14. “It’s all in the Vibe. Gotta have the ineffable sauce.”
15. “I am very tired and want to go home. In a cosmological sense.”
16. “There can be no Eden without gardeners, without those who love rich soil and clean water and old, old trees. It cannot be built nor sustained without callused hands and tired feet, without aching back and nails blackened with dirt. Perhaps the only difference between heaven and hell is whether the day’s labor ends with satisfaction or despair."
17. Dwarves associated with Hades / Pluto because of underground wealth.
18. DOVER BATHOS has remained at Anomalous Organism Storage Facility 05 since 1998.
19. Wherever the polyps emerged, they began to build enormous, hivelike arcologies of stone.
20. "Because they are alive, and we are not.”
21. Dream: Kittan’s youngest sister from TTGL shirts SHUT UP MOON MAN to the tune of Rob Zombie's “living dead girl”.
22. Martin had sworn to himself that he’d throw the next reporter to mention Sapir-Whorf out the nearest window, mostly in jest and frustration, and not sixteen hours later he was asked by a man from Scientific General if language dictated thought. He didn’t throw the reporter out the window, but he definitely wanted to, in a harmless, cartoon-physics sort of way.
23. Action / reaction / willpower (resist mental) / toughness (resist body)
24. Lost/anomalous media: medieval manuscript marginalia of Homestar characters
25. Dream: There is a basilosaurus in the lake, though it’s more of a nuisance than a danger.
26. To the king, that which cannot be enslaved - cannot be made property - must be destroyed. Seven hundred princes pledged allegiance to his banner, and his war parties returned to the palace so laden with treasure that they would break the backs of the pack mules.
27. Lothlorien is beautiful because the trees were loved (if only they loved their neighbors half as much, the pricks)
28. Anime that don’t exist: Grotty cult-classic sci-fi OVA, major MoSh fuel.
29. While translated as “mother”, the term is typically un gendered, and refers to anyone with the primary role of caring for and teaching a creche.
30. “You shall have your vengeance, but you shall not become it.”
31. Ribbon I want to do for convention Mothership games: “I died alone in space”
32. If magic is a beam of light, a rite is a series of focusing lenses that directs it through the prism of some unlucky bastard
33.  An anomalous transmission from the Voyager 1 spacecraft beginning November 18 2023. Situation is developing and under observation. 
34. …slipping out of the knotted dead-ends of time space when there is food to be had and the brane is thin…
35. The Door in the Wall
36. Alternate stat names: athletic aptitude, fast action, book smarts, street smarts, people skills
37. Missives from the Future: Transtemporal Stochastic Terrorism and its Effects on American Society (Jemison, 2025)
38. “Ganymede STC this is Oriole on final approach” “Copy that, Oriole, you’re cleared for docking, spur 4, bay 12.”
39. Laying on a straw mattress, listening to the crickets outside
40. Affix designating loanwords / phonetic spelling
41. “May this worthless blade be driven into a plowshare.”
42. Three common demons: guilt, despair, addiction
43. The etymology for cannabis is extremely murky, as it turns out. Heroditus claims it was from the Scythians, so you should give it to the amazons in your setting, at least.
44. If Lovecraft or one of his imitators had written the Red Pool, there would have been a character proclaiming without evidence that it was the spilled blood of Yog-Sothoth. This is a bad example because that's a fucking rad idea.
45. Generic Vernacular Fantasyland as alternate / echoed version of early 400s Britain; post Roman withdrawal (+ancient ruins), beginning of Angle-Saxon migrations / invasions (+orc stand-ins)
46. Planet where entire population descended from emulations of very limited original colonist population
47. Su’amatsanidan - I think this is supposed to gloss as “abstract mother-ship-person”, so it’s probably a term for a personified spaceship.
48. The Dust House / ANTIPETRICHOR
49. Radio in the kitchen: Preset stations pick up [spooky things]
50. 60 Years ecophage threats adapted for DG or MoSh.
51. Angga - paleolithic shamaness, maybe Willendorf herself
52. A priest of Mantuka, Devourer-of-Demons: More like a mountain that walks than a man
53. The Headhunters are not conscious - they are investigating humans primarily because self-awareness should have killed us a long time ago. We are an anomaly. Their experiments leave behind entire planets of human-derived livestock
54. Spec evo seed world but can only use SCP articles tagged with some sort of life form (animal, plant, fungus, species, etc) (or otherwise describe a clade of organisms)
55. DG agent: Sr. Margaret Tan - ~50 years old, small build, blue windbreaker, shotgun.
56. Morale is low: it is dark, and cold, and I would like to rest
57. The mosaic empire of the elves across the northern desert
58. A Lot of Zeroes premise I want to use: after detection of an alien megastructure, my spaceship is sent to panspermia the trail between it and Sol. 
59. Baqwoman - a title / profession
60. The sagani may take up divine mantles, but they do so by a different path than men.
61. The human/sapient prefix can be applied to non-sapient things as a personifier; different cultures will extend this to different things - ships, ainimae, exoselves.
62. Conlang idea - the language of Hole / Throne: the fossilized court of azathoth. Uses kanji and also Cherokee syllabary?
63. Dorothy, Alice, Lirazel vs John Carter’s invasion force; Carter overestimates how easy it is to return to earth gravity.
64. “He has need for neither posturing nor for glory: He’s going to kill a motherfucker and be done with it.”
65.  Δ-Class Citizen: colonial population support program (clone body, soul tether sigils)
66. You ever think about that bit in the tartakovsky clone wars where the Nelvaani kid recognizes and accepts his father despite his father having been turned into a monster?
67. The Eldest of Elders (Elden Beast) = transapient Elder Thing conglomerate (can embody in an avatar-body);   The binding ring (Elden Ring) = shoggoth tree-of-life command & control function.
68. Neanderthal body found frozen in permafrost, sufficiently preserved that a genome can be sequenced by porting in leftovers in modern humans.
69. CAPRA - Civic Anomalous Phenomena Response Agency 
70. Elephant variants: miniature, stilt, extremely colorful, rooter/tusker, many trunks 
71. Corvid variants: sun thief / golden-head raven, carnivale (parrot-like), thunderers, neoraptors
72. Cetacean variants: neo-ambulocetus, cyborg / walker-bots, whalesong-possessed humans, skywhales
73. Octopi variants: gasbag, shelled 
74. Paraphrasing cosmicorrery: A word to describe the feeling of sadness when one sees activities, games, or decorations put together in attempt to be Fun go unused, ignored, or dismissed. 
75. Cheap & easy conlang idea: take Latin then apply sound changes of Proto-Celtic to Old Irish, or take Proto-Celtic and apply sound changes of Latin to French or Occitan.
76. Via Robwords' episode on the etymology of dog: there are medeival English records that mention men named Wilfric Pig, Willelmo Hog, Roger le Doge, William le Frogge.
77. Extremely important historical fact: there were riots against the Inquisition in Carcassonne ~1300. The module writes itself!
78. Via Black Forager: Racahout - ground acorns in milk, a pre-chocolate hot chocolate
79. Echidna as mother of monsters but also progenitor of humanity
80. DG shotgun scenario: Inventory Day - Program agents are tasked with taking inventory at the Book Depository (old missile silo?), a long-term storage facility for weird shit. Naturally, among all the recovered Green Boxes, there is something horrible and unexpected.
81. “I attract strange people like honey attracts flies. There could be a talking monkey at my door and it wouldn’t be surprising.” 
82. The Spear of Lu - At forty-one confirmed kills, she is one of the most-veteran ships in the OSMAT fleets. 
83. The Pentaregia of Sigma Draconis
84. Demons that induce the sin vs demons that embody the sin as discrete orders of demon
85. Conjuration of spirits used to bypass development of scientific experimentation, because you can just ask a thing how it works.
86. Firebird units: Burner / Phoenix / Militia / Fireteam / Burnout
87. Courtly romance (n): wholly divorced from human experience, it contains no elements of an actual relationship and mostly serves as justification for men with power to cheat on their spouses. Guinevere never has to deal with Lancelot thrashing around in bed because of his PTSD dreams. 
88. Via Just King Things: M. John Harrison said that the editorial choice that saved his horror story The Ice Monkey was going back, removing the exposition, and keeping everything else intact.
89. In an effort to save the library from the encroaching polyps, a large chunk of the time space superstructure is violently torn out of reality. Some ruins are left behind, discovered so much later by the troodontids and humans. The yithians regroup in the distant future. Those that remain inside, unable to transmigrate or continue a population of conomorphs, attempt to develop other hosts. While they succeed, their minds are reduced to instinct, and these new docents tend to tomes they can neither read nor understand.
90. The triple hierophant - a towering exultant; long straight black hair, golden robes that appear to glow, headpiece like a sunburst
91. Idea: What if the existence of working conjuring means that you can kind of sidestep a lot of experimental science by just asking something "how do you work?"
92. You'd think that by this point goblins should would know to avoid adventurers
93. The problem with “work to live, not live to work” is that it still contains the unspoken and implicit corollary of “and those who don’t work, don’t get to live.”
94. FTL that autocorrects for paradoxes by removing the vessel from perception from all frames of reference. One it jumps it is fucking gone
95. Demon that causes miscarriages as male, bucking folkloric trend
96. Demon: A white bull ox ridden by a giant, blood-drenched man bound in hair-ropes. Blinded, cock like a flagpole
97. Appalachian Tsathoggua: I can't explain why it feels right, but it does.
98. Stealthy night monster identified by the sound of its grinding teeth
99. Lemman - Middle English word for one's lover, from Old English lēof +‎ mann. Gender neutral. We could stand to bring this one back, it's very useful. (Thanks to the Maniculum for pointing it out.)  
100. Goldberg polyhedrons: a sphere made of hexes, which is probably useful to y'all.
101. Language where the word for "wealthy" shares the same root as the word for fat.
102. I remember an old LP of Jurassic Park Trespasser that I enjoyed, really need to find it again. Old old, like definitely over a decade.
103. "Forgiveness is not transactional! Mercy is not a fucking gacha machine you can just feed tokens into until what you did is okay!"
104. For MoSh: Marines get sidearm, Teamsters get toolkit, Scientists get research database, Androids get logic core
105. Tostées dorées - French toast, when you're already in France.
106. Slimes are dragon vomit, containing bits and pieces of inedible matter like an owl pellet.
107. Runaway Station; phantom train stop that appears to a quartet of kids who have fled the residential school. 
108. Sour Stripes ? Sour Strips? Google gives me candy but I swear that was the name of the band.
109. Everyone goes for “oh the necronomicon is bound in human skin” and no one bothers asking “okay, whose skin is it? Seems like a lot of trouble. And honestly how can they even tell, it's leather! It is leather, right? It'd be rotting away if it wasn't..."
110. Japanese "starving woman" cryptid
111. Gravity was formulated relatively early, thanks to a monastic order high in the mountains, whose meditative practices involved rolling polished stone balls onto a taut sheet of silk or canvas that was shaped into a funnel by a central stone, and divining according to how the balls spiraled. 
112. Via Dr. Sledge: in Talmudic demonology, Shabiri / Shabriri (I couldn't discern if that first r was there when he said it) is the demon of night-blindness. Fair to assume that Miyazaki did that intentionally.
113. Knight errant as the fantasy of “get the cool parts of the military estate without the feudalism”
114. Lawful demons tempt into sin; chaotic demons embody it 
115. “The Knight” or “”The Lord”; an undead or possessed suit of armor to defend the town 
116. Combative magic is difficult and rare because most spirits will just refuse to do it 
117. A language: SVO, analytic. It possesses no tense but sufficient aspect
118. The sin of Power, combining within itself cruelty, greed, and pride
119. Video game Sea of Rifts uses "Exposure" instead of stability / insight / sanity, and I think I like it best of all. You don't understand it, but you're changed all the same. 
120. The angel corpse falls to seafloor and is covered with silts; geological upraising of the region, plus hundreds of millions of years of erosion, will lead to its discovery inside a mountain.

**

RED HED

A withered body, bluish-grey like colloidal silver poisoning. A swollen rubbery sphere, candy apple red and six feet across, grows out of its head, hanging in the air like a water balloon pulled by an unseen center of gravity high above. Its splay-toed feet are on backwards.

• Wounds: 2(20)
• Instinct: 40
• Combat: Non-Continguous Cutting Motion (30)
• Line-of-sight
• Seven-fingered hands and three-jointed arms snap into a sequence of angular contortions. Flesh is cut with the knife that is not.
• On failure: 3d10 damage, SAN save to negate
• One success: 1 wound (Blade), SAN save to reduce to failure result.

Ambrosia
The heavy, non-Newtonian fluid within the acephalonic sac is highly alkaline. It splashes over everything at Close range, damaging objects and burning exposed skin (1d10/round). Poison fumes burn eyes, mouth, nose; anyone who comes within Close range without eye protection will be temporarily blinded. Can be diluted with (large quantities of) water. Reacts with violent foaming reaction if acid is applied.

**

“Hi! My name’s Luce!”

Miriam looked at the girl on the doorstep and wondered for a moment why the last twenty-odd years of her life were regularly punctuated by the strangest people imaginable. She brushed the thought aside: the girl with blue hair was not nearly as strange as the talking monkey and confused monk, or the clay doves, or the choir of burning eyes, or the stone-bodied messenger, or any number of impossible things that seemed to follow her like dust on her heels.

“Are you lost?” Miriam asked.

“I’m on pilgrimage!” The girl said, beaming. “But I don’t know if I’m in the right place. So maybe I am lost.”

Miriam nodded. That made more sense.

“If you’re looking for Yeshua, he’s out with his brothers on a job. He’ll be back by sundown.”

**

 “You are so very concerned with whether things are real and care nothing for if they are true. When I woke up this morning, I went into the woods and pissed on a tree. That is real. If I tell the story of Chukan and how he tried to steal the sun’s wedding garment for his beloved, is it less true because I do not include every time he stopped and pissed against a tree? What bearing does that have on the story of a youth in the grips of lovesickness? The sun does not have garments, and even if he did, they would be far too large.” [Footnote: this size discrepancy is brought up in most versions of the story]

** 

Principle of Anthropocentic Expectation

It is always possible that a supernatural entity, either on their own or through external influence, is, artificially adjusting their appearance, properties, or circumstances so as to align with pre-existing human expectations; this may be embodied in tropes such as “people see what they think they should see” or “they picked this form because it was already familiar”, or it may be an intentional misdirection on the part of the supernatural entity.

** 

 

Please get these drafts out of my docs they have been sitting here for YEARS. 

 

Scrap Post 1: Making Better Transhuman Chargen

(Initially) an attempt to fix Eclipse Phase’s wonky morph system, that then turned into a broad sketch for a fully modular Knave-style slot-based build-a-character system.

Reason to Scrap It: The premise is so broad that my attempt to make a general-purpose system floundered (turns out, transhuman sci-fi is an extremely broad conceptual category) and I’d have to make an entire setting to give it anything substantial to work on, and I don’t enough about the idea to go to that work. I might dig it back

Scrap Post 2: Building the Verse (but Better)

Taking the oddly detailed numbers of Firefly’s Verse, plus some help from PlanetPlanet, and rebuilding the setting with some hard-science solar system generator or another for a slightly-more-realistic version.

Reason to Scrap It: The map is the only thing I particularly like about Firefly and while the numbers are useful, I’d need to re-arrange the system anyway to make it stable and at that point why not just make it wholly original.

 

Scrapped Post 3: Building a Fantasy Solar System

Either a collection of tables, an essay, or a worked example (or all three) to do what it said in the title.

Reason to Scrap It: Not enough substantial material to justify it as a standalone post. I still want to do something with the idea, since I am a fan of that tiny tiny Venn overlap of high fantasy and hard space science that basically no one else lives in, but if I do I'm going to just skip ahead to “making a solar system”. Probably for MSF, though the advantage of this method is that you can kinda just swap it into whatever setting because so few fantasy RPGs care about other planets.
 

Proto-Indo-European Resource Masterpost

Last Updated 1/14/26 

As I spent a large chunk of 2025 going down the rabbit hole of historical linguistics, I read a lot of extremely niche academic papers, obscure blogposts, and assorted crackpot theories: I’ve gathered all the ones I can remember here to offset the field's bullheaded resistance to ever putting anything in one place. Heaven forbid academic reference material be easy to find.

This will, of course, be a curated list shaped by my own interests and biases. If you're here because you want to get into hobbyist PIE linguistics, I encourage you to assemble your own trove.

**

Important Lessons to Know Going In

1. Reconstructed PIE is a model - it's highly flawed, it's not an accurate representation of the historical reality, but it is the best we've got at the moment.
2. Many resources online are out of date; there is no centralized database.
3. Wikipedia is not a good source to get in-depth information about PIE topics, only to learn that the topics exist. You will likely find yourself having to unlearn things like I did.
4. Literally anyone can post stuff to Academia.edu (which is a exceedingly enshittified website), and because the recommendation algorithm is a blind and senseless deity Academia.edu will regularly recommend you pdfs that are not peer reviewed / are not good scholarship / are not coherent and functional as a linguistics text / are basically just blog posts to a greater or lesser degree of quality.
5. PIE the language changed radically over time, especially when comparing before and after Anatolian split off: PIE the reconstruction rarely takes this into account.
6. The laryngeals are a headache and I highly recommend removing them immediately, or at the very least being judicious about where they are kept. 
7. Go through morphology and lop off the stuff you know you don't want to keep before you start sound changes.
8. Sometimes you need to make an arbitrary choice and stick with it: sound changes are a rabbit hole: go in with a target and don't let yourself get waylaid by what-ifs.
9. Word-building is actually easier if you just make them yourself from a root list and the endings.
10.  THE SPIRIT OF THE LAW IS MORE IMPORTANT THAN THE LETTER - if you have to fudge things to make the project work, fudge to your heart's content. The rules are made up & the points don't matter. 

**

The Indo-European Conlang Checklist

1. So, why are you doing this? (d4)
1. I like difficult and complex puzzles
2. I am classically, King Lear Act 4 insane
3. I have a high tolerance to frustration  
4. I am desperate for a distraction from The Horrors 
2. Have you reconsidered? (d3)
1. Now that you mention it, backing out seems like a good idea.
2. Ha-ha, I'm in danger! 
3. I barely consider things the first time: full steam ahead!
3. Are you sure? How about a sub-family? They're more reasonable. (d10)
1. Proto-Albanian
2. Proto-Anatolian
3. Proto-Armenian
4. Proto-Balto-Slavic
5. Proto-Celtic
6. Proto-Germanic
7. Proto-Hellenic
8. Proto-Indo-Iranian
9. Proto-Italic
10. Proto-Tocharian
4. Won't be dissuaded? Suit yourself. How are you handling the laryngeals? (d12)
1. I'm deleting them immediately, like a sane person would. 
2. Rasmussen - h / x / ɣʷ 
3. Kloekhorst - ʔ / q(ː) / q(ː)ʷ 
4. Lindeman - x́, ɣ́ / x, ɣ / xʷ, ɣʷ 
5. Keiler - / h / ħ / ʕ
6. Bomhard 1 - ʔ / x / ɣ 
7. Beekes -  ʔ / ʕ / ʕʷ 
8. Kümmel - h / χ / ʁ 
9. Meier-Brügger - ʔ / x / ɣ(ʷ) 
10. Kortlandt -  ʔ / q~χ / qʷ~χʷ
11. Pooth - ʔ / χ / ʕ
12. Ringe -  ç / x / xʷ
5. And if those are too normal for you... (d4)
1. Szemerenyi - h [1]
2. Martinet -  ʔ, h / χ , ʁ, ħ, ʕ / χʷ , ʁʷ, ħʷ, ʕʷ [2]
3. Bomhard 2 - ʔ / ħ͡h / ʕ͡ħ / h [3]
4. Pyysalo - aɦ / ɦa [4]
6. Glottalic theory: yea or nay? (d10)
1. Traditional - Plain / Voiced / Breathy
2. Hopper - Plain / Ejective / Voiced
3. Gamkrelidze and Ivanov - Aspirated / Ejective / Breathy
4. Beekes - Plain / Preglottalized / Aspirated
5. Kümmel - Plain / Implosive / Voiced
6. Clackson - Plain / Creaky / Breathy
7. Shcirru - Plain / Preglottalized / Slack
8. Kortlandt - Geminated / Ejective / Plain
9. The Tocharian Option - Fuck all this, collapse everything to plain unvoiced stops.
10. Fuck it, they were actually affricates [5]
7. Centum, Satem, or the Forbidden Third Option? (d4)
1. Centum - Get that god damn palatovelar series out of here.
2. Satem - There will be no labialized consonants under this roof thank you very much.
3. Menage a troistem - All three dorsal series are present, no there will not be an explanation. [6]
4. Qantum - plain velars were actually uvular, palatovelars were plain. [7]
8. How are thorn ([alveolar stop]+[velar stop]) clusters getting resolved? (d8)
1. No change; TK => TK
2. Metathesis; TK => KT
3. Assibilation; TK => sK
4. Deletion; TK => *K
5. Metathesis-Assibilation: TK =>KT => Ks
6. Metathesis-Deletion: TK => KT => *T
7. Metathesis-Assibilation-Deletion: TK => KT => Ks => *s
8. Metathesis-Deletion-Affrication; TK => KT => *T => *Ts 
9. Do the S be mobile? (d4)
1. Mobile S is present in all cases. [8]
2. Mobile S is absent in all cases. [8] 
3. Mobile S is present seemingly at random 
4. Not only is Mobile S absent, it seems like it never appeared in this branch: any roots that pattern as STeDh are now DheDh. [8]
10. Am I finally done? (d1)
1. No. You're in it now. Welcome to Wonderland, we're all mad here.

[1] - Not a mistype, just one laryngeal with no coloring effect: he supposes PIE just had more vowels and ablaut patterns than thought.

[2] - The book is in French so I have no idea how he defined which environments got what. 

[3] - As used in his book on Nostratic; the sounds used for h2 and h3 don't appear in PHOIBLE, Wikipedia, or cursory google search, so take that as you will.

[4] I'm including this one because it exists; I do not care to spend the time to wrap my head around this theory, which considering what I have spent that time on should say a lot.

[5] This is extremely unlikely in reality, and I don't know of anyone who actually supports it.

[6] To my knowledge, no daughter languages keep all three. Melchert claims that Luwian did, but it doesn't look like he has gotten significant support on this

[7] This is not an uncommon stance, and it does play nicely with the laryngeals being uvulars, but it isn't the mainstream of the model.

[8] To the best of my knowledge, three of the four options here are not extant, I just included them to make a table. 

** 

The rest of this post is going to be links to resources and citations, divvied up into categories. While I am grouping by quality, I am compiling by quantity, and so I will include sources do not align with the mainstream of the field, which may also be sources that I don't agree with / don't consider to be good sources / are just plain wrong: I will notate these accordingly. Those whose contents I have forgotten i make no such promises for.

Recommended Reading

Books I would recommend to people who don't give a shit about conlangs but are modestly interested in PIE. 

• Beekes, Robert: Comparative Indo-European Linguistics: An Introduction (2011)
•  This is probably the best general-audience overview you're going to find, or at least that I've found. Beekes manages to cover an enormous amount of material in an approachable and thorough manner and doesn't get lost in the weeds. 
•  Mallory, J. P., D. Q. Adams: The Oxford Introduction to Proto-Indo European (2006)
• The other gold standard. If you have bit of linguistics knowledge going in or a willingness to learn you'll have a good time. Where Beekes is the all-rounder, Mallory & Adams is more specific, divying up the reconstructed PIE vocabulary by topic and combing through to see which words are best attested, and how they came to be.

 

 

The Big 4

The ur-resources.

• Pokorny, J. Indogermanisches Etymologisches Woerterbuch (Indo-European Etymological Dictionary) (1959)
• Out-of-date. Does not contain laryngeals or Anatolian material. Still somehow the most approachable lexicon. You can find a cleaned-up online version via the University of Texas: if you want fewer moving parts for your project and don't care overly much about accuracy, it's servicable. There's also a edited / cleaned up / laryngeal-including version here, though I can't find who was behind it.
• Rix, Helmut, Martin Kümmel et al. Lexikon der indogermanischen Verben (Lexicon of Indo-European Verbs, LIV)
• Has not been translated into English.
• Indo-European Etymological Dictionary Series
• Incomplete; the project turns 35 next year and the promised grand unified replacement for Pokorny is most likely dead in the water - the most recent of the dictionaries was released in 2014. You can, of course, not find all of these in the same place, because Indo-Europeanists break out in hives when things are too convenient
• Wikipedia & Wiktionary
• A cobbled together mess; outdated information is everywhere, along with shoddy and questionable reconstructions. Use with caution.

You will notice that I throw shade on all these sources: this is because they are inadequate and are unlikely to ever be replaced. Your average fan wiki has better organization than this field. 

Andrew Byrd at the University of Kentucky has been working on DERBi PIE (Database of Etymological Roots Beginning in PIE), but the website is basically just a holding page and given how funding for the humanities has been going the odds of seeing it to completion are lower than even the extremely low rate of the field.

 

Top Billing

Articles which I think are good for just understanding PIE / the most useful ones for conlanging.

• Byrd, Andrew: Reconstructing Indo-European Syllabification (2010)
• Byrd's stuff is generally just good to look into, since he focuses a lot on reconstructing PIE as a language that people spoke over a algebraic formula. 
• Byrd, Andrew: The Rules of Reconstruction: Making our Etymologies More Grounded (2017)
• That is, if you can find his papers - I had found this paper on Academia within the last year, but since then it and all of Byrd's other papers have been pulled from that site and further searching led me expensive dead ends. I am reminded, once again, of why not going on to higher ed was a blessing, I would lose my fucking mind with this recursive walled garden.
• Gąsiorowski, Piotr: The use and misuse of evidence in linguistic reconstruction (2012)
• A useful reminder about how reconstructions are never set in stone, and how they can be shaped by bias and lack of data. 
• Kiparsky, Paul: Compositional vs. Paradigmatic Approaches to Accent and Ablaut (20XX) 
• Origin point for a (thankfully, it seems, gradually catching-on) alternative to the traditional PIE accentuation schema, which tosses out the rather arbitrary categories with a series of rules that can be applied to derive the patterns that have been reconstructed in a natural and logical manner. A few other works cited in this post build on this paper, and I'll mark them as such.
• Kümmel, Martin: On new reconstructions of PIE "laryngeals", especially as uvular stops (2022)
•  This is, in my amateur's opinion, the best argument I've yet seen made for the laryngeals and their identity: namely, that they pattern in Hittite like a fortis / lenis or unvoiced / voiced pair, and taking other  aspects into account were probably χ and ʁ, which he notes does not rule out earlier q and ɢ or later h, x, or ħ.
• Kümmel, Martin: Typology and reconstruction: The consonants and vowels of Proto-Indo-European (2012)
•  Wins a slot here for being simple and functional: he goes through the available evidence, compares it to the patterns of modern languages, and comes up with serviceable answers for the plain voiced series and the development of the vowel system.
• Weiss, Michael: The Proto-Indo-European Laryngeals and the Name of Cilicia in the Iron Age (2016)
• If Kümmel's 2022 paper above is the magic bullet, I consider this to be the smoking gun: when Hittite proper nouns were transliterated into neighboring languages such as Akkadian, the laryngeal descendant ḫ was consistently written with symbols for uvular consonants instead of pharyngeals (since Akkadian made that distinction and Hittite did not).
• Yates, Anthony and Jesse Lundquist: The Morphology of Proto-Indo-European (2018) 
• Yates, Anthony: (Reconstructing) stress assignment in Hittite and Proto-Indo-European (2016) 
• Builds on Kiparsky: the Hittite evidence checks out in favor of the Compositional Theory.
• Yates, Anthony: Some basics of Indo-European Phonology (2018)

Personal Wildcards

Articles that I, personally, think are great specifically for me, but which might not be particularly sturdy hypotheses or are otherwise nonstandard. We all get to have a couple Crank Credits as a treat, and these are mine.

• Adiego, Ignasi-Xavier; A little-known law on the root and syllable structures of Proto-Indo-European (2022) 
• This paper, combined with Jan’s below, has me convinced that at least some of the laryngeals were approximants formed by vowels breaking under stress, because there are a lot of roots that otherwise inexplicably pattern as CHVR. So much PIE scholarship ties itself in knots over *i and *u. If the same sound is *ew when stressed and *u when unstressed, that means that stress broke the vowel
• Bičovský, Jan: Proto-Indo-European laryngeals and voicing assimilation (2019) 
• h3 being treated as voiced and labialized has always felt weird to me, because neither of those traits are necessary to fulfill the criteria they supposedly fill: the voicing assimilation premise is based on exactly one word, and labialization is based on turning adjacent *e to *o, despite no other labialized consonants doing that. Jan here is in the same boat, and he lays out a solid case against the traditional reconstruction and paired argument for laryngeals as having both fricative and approximant realizations.
• Gąsiorowski, Piotr: Another long grade: Non-canonical ablaut involving PIE *ā (2013) 
• Speculation on the mechanisms that could lead to an *ā ./ *a ablaut series in PIE. I appreciate that it's labeled as non-canonical up front.
• Monti, Nicolás: The twofold development of PIE *o in Greek, Italic and Celtic (2026-) and Again on the reflex of medial PIE *ō (2026-)
• These papers have gotten several updates since I first became aware of them, so I'm linking Monti's main profile page instead. These are some pretty radical papers (as in, what they propose would rewrite half of the reconstructive model if true) and they are very much still WIPs, but they're also the sort of theory where I kinda want it to be true. Wanting doesn't mean being, of course, but the theory is easy to understand and can probably help simplify a lot of a conlang project.

 

Laryngeals & Laryngeal Accessories

Now you too can be driven to rend your garments and pluck out your beard like an old testament prophet whenever you see an H!

• Beekes, Robert: The Nature of the Proto-Indo-European Laryngeals (198?) 
• While an old paper compared to most of this list, it does draw an interesting comparison to the Salish language Shuswap and its pharyngeal consonants; a good model to use if you don't want to use Kummel's.
• Hartmann, Frederik: The phonetic value of the Proto-Indo-European laryngeals (2021)
• This article approaches the subject from a statistical analysis angle, which is novel, though I think the conclusions are pretty much nonsense because he was feeding Wiktionary into a neural network.
• Kloekhorst, Alwin: Evidence for a phonemic glottal stop in Hittite as the outcome of PIE *h1: a reassessment (2022)
• Kloekhorst, Alwin: CaR vs. Ca-aR spellings in Hittite: evidence for a phonemic distinction between /ə/ and /a/ (2021)
• Kümmel, Martin: The conditioning for secondary ḫ in Hittite (2014) 
• Woodhouse, Robert: Two Properties of PIE *h3 (2015)
• Woodhouse, Robert: Lubotsky's and Beekes' laws, PIE *(H)r-, *(H)i(V)-, *a and some other laryngeal matters (2011) 

Other Phonology Articles

Because there are, in fact, non-laryngeal sounds in PIE

• Barnett, Phillip: A Markedly Different Approach: Investigating PIE Stops Using Modern Empirical Methods (2018)
• Bičovský, Jan: The phonetics of PIE *d, II: the evidence from daughter languages (2021)
• Donnelly, Patrick: Concatenative Phonetic Synthesis for the Proto-Indo-European Languages (20XX)
• Melchert, H. Craig: Hittite Historical Phonology after 100 Years (and after 20 Years) (201X) 
• Prescott, Charles: Pharyngealization and the three dorsal stop series of Proto-Indo-European (2018)
• This is a bit of a marginal theory, but it's interesting and not impossible. 
• Woodhouse, Robert: Delabialization after *u and the distribution of labiovelars in dialectal Proto-Indo-European (2017)
• Woodhouse, Robert: Some More Etymologies not  Requiring Proto-Indo-European *b (2008) 
• Woodhouse, Robert: Tectal neutralization after *s in PIE: a corrected restatement (2014) 

 

Roots and Syllables

Little nuggets of sound

• Corbaeu, Alain: Phonological Root Structure Constraints in PIE (20??) 
• Kazansky, Nikolai: Root extension as a linguistic problem (2018)  
• Vernet, Mariona: Proto-Indo-European and Proto-Semitic root incompatibilities: a new typological approach (2018) 

 

Stress and Accent

Let me tell you how much I have come to hate mobile accent since I began this research...

• Hyman, Larry: How (not) to do phonological typology: the case of pitch-accent (2009) 
• This isn't PIE-specific, but I include it here because PIE is typically referred to as "pitch accent" language, and Hyman is arguing here (with a focus on modern languages) that this isn't a meaningful label. 
• Keydana, Götz: Accent in Thematic Nouns (2013)
•  This one gets into some eyes-n-the-inside territory, but builds on compositional theory well to explain trends in the thematic nouns (namely that they were not somehow immune to the systems that created the athematic declensions)
• Kloekhorst, Alwin: Indo-European Nominal Ablaut Patterns: The Anatolian Evidence  (20XX)
• Kloekhorst, Alwin: The origin of the Proto‑Indo‑European nominal accent-ablaut paradigms (2018)
• Sandell, Ryan: Perspectives on the Reconstruction of the Proto-Indo-European Accentual System (2014) 

Placeholder Category

For stuff that I either can't sort into a different category or can't be bothered to.

• Anderson, Cormac et al: The Indo-European Cognate Relationships Dataset (2025)
• DiLisi, Jessica: Feature metathesis and the change of PIE *dw- to Classical Armenian -rk (2013)
• Everyone's favorite wacky sound change! 
• DiLisi, Jessica: Notes on Indo-European Linguistics (2013)
• This one is very clearly a draft for a paper, given that it's mostly a bullet list.
• Fenwick, Rhona: Descendants and ancestry of a Proto-Indo-European phytonym *meh₂l- (20XX) 
• Garnier, Romain and Benoît Sagot: Metathesis of Proto-Indo-European Sonorants (2019)
• Garnier, Romain, Philippe Hattat, and Benoît Sagot: What is Old is New again: PIE Secondary Roots with Fossilised Preverbs (2019)
• Gąsiorowski, Piotr: Gender and numeral classifiers in Modern Nepali and their Proto-Indo-European analogues (2020)
• Ginevra, Riccardo: Locative alternation in Proto-Indo-European (2024) 
• Kloekhorst, Alwin: Evidence for a new pre-Proto-Indo-European sound law *-ē̆m > PIE *-ō̆m (2024) 
• Kortlandt, Frederik: The disintegration of the Indo-European language family (20XX) 
• I don't care for Kortlandt's laryngeals and think he gets a bit too into the weeds with Indo-Uralic, but he's also kinda the main guy for things like this. I think that this is more-or-less somewhere in the correct ballpark, so it's at least useful. 
• Melchert, H. Craig: Historical Phonology of Anatolian (1993) 
• Milanova, Veronika: Brothers and Many Others: The Concept ‘Offspring’ and its Semantic Extensions in Indo- European Languages (2020)
• Milanova, Veronika: Indo-European kinship terms as an interdisciplinary topic: reconstruction of social realities - anthropological views and methodological considerations (2020) 
• Milanova, Veronika: (Proto-)Indo-European kinship terms in *-ter and (ancient) age-grade systems. (2016)
• This is mostly a bullet list, but I think it's an extremely interesting one dissecting the PIE familiar terms and how they are not as clean-cut and nuclear as typically thought. 
• Slade, Benjamin: Split Serpents and Bitter Blades: Reconstructing Details of the PIE Dragon-Combat (2009) 
• Woodhouse, Robert: Hittite etymologies and notes (2012) 
• Yastrebov-Pestritskiy, Mikhail and Dmitry Bystov: Searching for the Lexical Core of Proto-Indo-European Language (2020) 
• Yastrebov-Pestritskiy, Mikhail and Dmitry Bystov: The Lexical Core of the Proto-Indo-European Language: The Complete Swadesh List (202?)
• Yates, Anthony: A new prosodic reconstruction of Proto-Indo-European *-mon-stems (2022)

 

The Pooth Zone

Roland Pooth is either an absolute madman or 100% on the money, no in-between. His interpretation of PIE as a Semitic-style root-and-pattern language plus direct-inverse alignment is extremely out there, but even if he is completely wrong, he’s still made a cohesive and consistent model that provides coherent explanations for some of the otherwise inexplicable elements of the traditional model, and that’s a fair sight better than most of the field. I'm not linking his entire corpus here, but enough to give you an idea of what you'll be dealing with.

• From Proto-Indo-European to Indo-European: After the Great Voice Shift and the Morphotactic Fusion (201X)
• Pooth, Roland: Linguistic Analysis and Comparative Philology: The Case-Marking System of Proto-Indo-European (201X)
• Pooth, Roland: The North Wind and the Sun in the Proto-Indo-European Language (2023) 
• Pooth, Roland: The Proto-Indo-European Aspect System (2014) 
• Pooth, Roland: Proto-Indo-European Nominal Morphology. Part 1: The Noun (2015) 
• Pooth, Roland: Proto-Indo-European Nominal Morphology. Part 2. Adjectives (2017) 
• Pooth, Roland: Proto-Indo-European Syntax. Part 1. Complementation Strategies (2016)
• Pooth, Roland: Proto-Indo-European Verb Morphology Part 1: Inflection (2016)

 

Indo-Uralic & long-range stuff, etc

Take all of this with a complimentary salt lick. I don't support any of these theories beyond "it'd be really cool if that was the case" / "yeah there's a good chance of a connection, but there's no way to prove it"; you'll find out in short order that people can make themselves a semi-convincing argument for a relationship between PIE and damn near anything, which will be entirely incompatible with every other semi-convincing argument. This is fine if you are doing Conlang Shit, because you can just arbitrarily pick a version you like and roll with that.

• Cerantonio, Robert: 100 Proto-Indo-European Words that are inherited from Proto-Afroasiatic (2023) 
• I think Cerantonio's reasoning is too dependent on sound correspondences (correspondence doesn't deal well with environment-triggered sound changes or loan words), and Proto-Afroasiatic is an absolute mess that has yet to settle on an agreed-upon model, but if you disregard that it doesn't quite match up with the sources it's solid for inspiration if you want to take that route
• Hovers, Onno: The Indo-Uralic sound correspondences (2023)
• A first draft that does not appear to have gotten a second, much less peer review. Included here because it might provide some interesting ideas to swipe.
• Kloekhorst, Alwin and Tijmen Pronk: Reconstructing Proto-Indo-Anatolian and
  Proto-Indo-Uralic (201X)
• This is the introduction a larger work edited by Kloekhorst and Pronk, The Precursors of Proto-Indo-European: The Indo-Anatolian and Indo-Uralic
  Hypotheses (2019). it is, unfortunately, published by Brill, and so will cost you three kilos of ground unicorn horn, thirteen phoenix eggs, and the head of John the Baptist. I've read most of the component chapters, and they're fairly good for conlang inspiration.
• Kloekhorst, Alwin: Some Indo-Uralic Aspects of Hittite (2008)
• Kortlandt, Frederik: Indo-European between Uralic and Caucasian (2017)
• Kortlandt, Frederik: Indo-Uralic (200?)
• Kortlandt, Frederik: The Indo-Uralic Verb (2001) 
• Kroonen, Guus (ed.): Sub-Indo-European Europe: Problems, Methods, Results (2024)
• Martian bigfoot in the flesh: a publication by Brill that doesn't cost both kidneys and your firstborn child. 

 

Helpful and / or Silly Stuff I Found on Reddit

It ain't peer-reviewed, but sometimes plain speech and the freedom to shoot the shit is fruitful. You will notice an abundance of links to r/linguisticshumor: this is because r/linguistics dried up under extremely strict posting rules.

•  The Phonetic Value of the Proto-Indo-European Vowels
• Specifically, the linked comment by u/vokzhen 
• PIE h₁ h₂ h₃ are x́ x xʷ
• Talking about PIE's Laryngeals and Vowels 
• Thoughts on PIE Laryngeals
• PIE and modern English have the same vowel inventory
• This is a shitpost, but they're onto something here.
• What can be Inferred about the ancestor of Proto-Indo-European? (Proto-proto-Indo-European) 
• High-effort meme: the ULTIMATE Indo-European iceberg 
•  These are not sourced in the thread or the image, but they are good as a fast-and-loose of "what are some curveballs I can use?" More importantly, it's a bunch of weird theories all in one place.
• What non-standard thoeries about PIE you find the most interesting? Do you think they might be actually correct? 
• What do we know about the phonology of Pre-Proto-Indo-European? 

Assorted Blogposts

Some of these are from 5-10 years before some sizable developments in the field, and so are a bit diminished when it comes to accuracy. But, they are amateurs for amateurs and that's got it's place, especially if your goal is conlang stuff and the spirit of the law takes priority over the letter.

• Cerantonio, Robert: A Comparison of Features Among Indo-European Languages (2024) 
• Cerantonio, Robert: Some phrases in the Proto-Indo-European language (2024)
• Good if you want to do a translation challenge but are tired of the usual suspects. 
• Dragonlinguistics: The prehistory of PIE vowels, part 1 (2017)  
• Simple and straightforward, good if you want to just pick something and not worry about it. 
• Gordon, Glen: Diachrony of Pre-IE 2008Aug10 (2008)
• This doc only exists now because some Scribd bot scraped it and was one of the main influences that got me to go "oh yeah I could do this" - I don't think this proposal would hold up particularly well vs the decade+ of scholarly material that's been written since this was penned, but so it goes.
• Gordon, Glen: I tripped over Pre-PIE the other day (2008)
• Gordon, Glen: The Great Pre-IE Centralization (2007)
• Gordon, Glen: Precising on a new rule to explain Pre-IE word-final voicing (2008)
• Housecarpenter: Reconstructing the sound of the Proto-Indo-European laryngeals (2015) 
• Housecarpenter: Vowel-initial and vowel-final roots in Proto-Indo-European (2016)
• PhoeniX: *a that Proto-Indo-European sound inventory (2010)
• In a sobering reminder to always back up your shit, this blog vanished between when i was compiling my notes and when I started writing this post. It was updated as recently as 2024 and poof, hosting service went kablooey. At least one other post I had bookmarked for inclusion here is lost with no backup on Wayback, titled "3-trep-strebʰ".
• Possessivesuffix: Tumblr post Janurary 23rd, 2018, 8:47 AM
• An alternative reconstruction of the stop series, where there was a vowel phonation difference that then caused the stops to split. 
• Pystynen, J:  A Fourth Laryngeal in PIE (2018)
• I think this is a pretty convincing convincing argument: if h2 is a velar fricative, it would be extremely strange for there not to be a labialized counterpart when there is a series of labialized velar stops.
• whatevernatureis: re: Vowel-initial and vowel-final roots in Proto-Indo-European (2016?)
• Not actually about vowel-initial / final roots, but does present a cogent and easy-to-follow method by which a vowel system similar to PIE could evolve. You could do a lot worse for pre-PIE conlangs than using this. 

 

I Do Not Vouch for These

Still potentially good for inspiration, though caveat that emptor.

• Adolfo, Zavaroni: Prenasalized stops in IE and possible semantic developments from 'bite' to 'take' (2007)
• Prenasalized stops are a wild take for PIE, but the kind of wild that has potential conlang-applicable uses. 
• Bomhard, Allan: A Comprehensive Introduction to Nostratic Comparative Linguistics: With Special Reference to Indo-European, 5th Edition (2023)
•  An attempted reconstruction of Nostratic, a proposed ur-language family that contains within it most Eurasian language families. I don't find this a particularly convincing text and I think it'd be much better served as a work of fiction. I've considered using it as a basis for a conlang, though that doesn't sit quite right with me for reasons I can't adequately describe. But, and this is to his credit, Bomhard cites basically everyone else who has ever published in historical linguistics while laying out his grand unified theory. Good if you want to get some trailheads on what other people have said.
• Villamor, Fernando: 2500 PIE ROOTS REVISITED (THE SOURCE CODE 3.0) (2022)
• This guy turned PIE into something that borders on Earthsea-style true names. I'm listing it purely as a source of inspiration for TTRPG magic systems.

Useful Resources

Don't leave home without 'em.

• BlindBanana06: PIE lemmas
• JoTBa: PIE Reference Sheet V.1 
• These two spreadsheets are legitimately the reason I started all this nonsense: compilations of Wiktionary data is a fucking godsend. Absolutely vital for when you are testing out sound changes or building words from roots.
• Lexurgy Sound Changer
• Pystynen, J: List of Proto-Indo-European roots by distribution (2015)
•  An absolute necessity.
• Pystynen, J: PIE verb roots, for the people (2016)
• This is a spreadsheet of the entire LIV; It's not translated into English, however. 
• Quiles, Carlos and Fernando López-Menchero: A Grammar of Modern Indo-European: Prometheus Edition (2012)
• Note well: this is a conlang, not a scholarly reconstruction, and it is limited to a specific areal branch of late Indo-European. The authors have taken creative liberties with the material, but this also means that if you are making a conlang and want to evolve from something more well-behaved than the normal reconstructions, this isn't a half-bad option.
• Verduria forum members: The Great Proto-Indo-European Thread's Sequel 

 

So What Have We Learned? 

The people writing fanfics about the statue that shits blood and then kills you instantly are better at organizing and cross-linking their work than historical linguists.

 

 

50 Things You Heard Online About Aklo

One would be hard-pressed to find a language more beset by crankery than Aklo. For well over a century it has been the cornerstone of an entire subgenre of bullshit, and the forecast shows no signs of letting up. TikTok, YouTube and Instagram are flooded with claims that it:

1. Is the original human language
2. Confirms hard Sapir-Worf
3. Contains no word for love
4. Grants its speakers magical powers
5. Was inherited from aliens
6. Was inherited from angels
7. Was inherited from demons
8. Was inherited from neanderthals
9. Is a memetic virus from space
10. Is Proto-Indo-European
11. Is Proto-Dene-Yeneseian
12. Is Proto-Nostratic
13. Is Proto-Dene-Sinitic-Caucasian
14. Was spoken by dwarflike pre-Celtic inhabitants of Europe 
15. Was spoken by pre-Christian witch-cults
16. Was spoken in Atlantis and / or Lemuria and / or Mu
17. Was spoken prior to the Tower of Babel
18. Was invented by the Soviet Union in order to destabilize the United States
19. Was invented by the Nazis in order to speak to esoteric Hyperborean intelligences
20. Was invented by the child-eating secret societies of the English aristocratic elite
21. Was invented by the United States in order to destabilize the Soviet Union
22. Was invented by Yakub so white people could conspire in secret
23. Was invented by linguists to perpetuate the hoax of Proto-Indo-European
24. Was invented by John Dee
25. Was invented by Noam Chomsky
26. Was invented by the Freemasons
27. Was invented by the Jesuits
28. Was invented by medieval kabbalists
29. Was invented by the United Nations
30. Has grammatical features found in no natural human language
31. Has no numbers
32. Doesn’t permit recursion
33. Violates linguistic universals
34. Isn’t truly pronounceable by humans
35. Is completely without phonemic vowels
36. Is the original language of the Necronomicon
37. Is the language of the Voynich Manuscript
38. Is instinctively understood by children deprived of language
39. Can only be properly translated by AI
40. Is an AI-generated hoax
41. Was spoken by at least two of the 9/11 hijackers
42. Is actually bastardized Sanskrit
43. Is actually bastardized Hungarian
44. Is actually bastardized Basque
45. Is the only oligosynthetic natural language
46. Features no grammatical or semantic ambiguity
47. Can be translated into any language with no loss of meaning
48. Was spoken by God to create the universe
49. Contains a word that will end the world if read aloud
50. Is an elaborate worldbuilding project that got out of hand.

Cursory review of even moderately-reliable sources indicates few to none of these claims has even minimal backing in mainstream linguistics.

Public Domain Roundup 2026

Let’s get this year started on the right foot (well, as right as we can get given the Circumstances) with more art liberated from the shackles of copyright. All this shit is yours now, do with it as you will.

This isn’t going to be an exhaustive list by any stretch (check out Public Domain Review, Duke University, the Smithsonian, and Wikipedia for more), and will be shaped, as always, by my own foppery and whim.

• Important reminder 1: The public domain elements of a long-running series extend only up to the point of expiry, so characters, plot elements, and whatnot from an installment in 1931 or later are still under copyright (if that story hasn’t fallen out of copyright through other means). Estates love abusing this (“Holmes can’t show emotions yet, that’s still under copyright!”).
• Important reminder 2: Trademarks cover branding, and many of the rights-holders are real bastards about things like names and costumes and whatnot. So it’s in your best interest to shake things up a little & put your fingerprint on your version of the character (makes for better derivatives, anyway)

Anyway, let’s get rolling.

Nancy Drew

Secret of the Old Clock, The Hidden Staircase, The Bungalow Mystery and The Mystery at Lilac Inn are all good to go (in their 1930 versions, not the 1959-1960 reprints). Any PD use of Nancy would have to be based on the contents of just these four works, which probably is in everyone’s benefit because you’ve got less to wade through and it’s yet to become set in its ways.

Relevant: We’re also now up to the first 9 Hardy Boys books. Honestly we are spoiled for choice when it comes to detectives, most of the big names of the era are PD now.

Adaptation: The great thing about a plucky teenage detective is that you can toss them in basically any story with a mystery element and it'll work out fine: Nancy tracking down the rare book thief who stole from the Miskatonic University special collection, for example. Plenty of room for moving her around in time or writing her at different stages of her life, as well: book came out in 1930, Nancy is 16 in it, so she was born in 1913-1914 and so you could feasibly set her anywhere up to the late 90s early 00s if you took this route. (I like this method a lot; rooting the characters in time and place allows you to bring all that historical context to bear.)

Miss Marple

Now, Miss Marple is technically already PD because she first appeared in some short stories in 1927, but those got republished in Thirteen Problems in 1932 so trying to track down the originals will likely be a pain and a half. Anyway, Murder at the Vicarage hit PD this year, and it’s going to be the only one for another 12 years.

Adaptation: Crossover with Nancy Drew, obviously, could get a fun mentor-student dynamic out of that. 

 

The Burroughs Corner

1930 gets us both A Fighting Man of Mars as well as Tarzan at the Earth’s Core. For those of you keeping track at home, that’s seven Barsoom novels, 13 Tarzan novels, three Pellucidar novels, and one extremely litigious estate that’s never let the reality of copyright law get in the way of picking at a warmed-over exquisite corpse. They’ll let you read the stuff on Gutenberg but heaven forbid you come within nine miles of their trademarks.

Adaptation: Given the quite repetitive nature of these series, adaptations have their work cut out for them as either "just steal the monsters and whatnot and plug them into something else" or "massively overhaul the entire thing into some drastically new form", or some mix between the two. The latter is a safer bulwark against the vulture estate, as it's much more difficult to claim infringement of trademark when there's no way anyone could confuse the derivative work with the original. 

Last and First Men

I read this one last year, and had some sizable thoughts on it: mainly that it was extremely inspiring in those moments when it was not extremely frustrating or dull. It’s a canvas to work from / lego box to loot, not so much something to adapt directly: science has indeed marched on and Stapledon’s knowledge of astronomical, evolutionary and social science is very much limited by time, place and circumstance. Expect a post about this in the future, I’ve been percolating thoughts.

Adaptation: The weirdo future posthumans are the highlight of the work, but they're also something that needs a good bit of elbow grease to use. It's not really a plug and play if you want to do it justice.

Golden Bat

He’s a gold skeleton with a sword and a sick cape. Life goals, certainly, but also part of a cool storytelling tradition that I had only heard about in the lead up to writing about this post.

Golden Bat started in kamishibai, which was a type of street performance during the Depression and post-War period where the storyteller would perform with a little stage they could slot pictures into: it’s basically an analogue PowerPoint party, where you’re ad-libbing something funny with the slides you have available. Absolutely fascinating, definitely worth including wherever it can fit (and of course, include the Golden Bat)

Adaptation: There have been several movie, manga, and anime adaptations, none of which are PD. (Golden Bat being from Atlantis is from this later version). Best play it safe and just have the gold skeleton with a sword and sick cape and work from there. You don't need lore, it's Golden Bat!

Other Noteworthies

• All Quiet on the Western Front (film version)
• As I Lay Dying (plus several Faulkner shorts)
• The Maltese Falcon (book only)
• Rover the dog (he doesn't become Pluto until later)
• Flip the Frog (from Fiddlesticks, first color cartoon with sound)
• Betty Boop ("Dizzy Dishes" only, so she's still in weird dog-hybrid mode) 
• Composition with Red, Blue and Yellow (Piet Mondrian) 
• The Sun God's Children (Good writeup here) 
• Folk Tales of All Nations (Good writeup here, same blog as above)

 

** 

Something I've noticed in my occasional visits to r/publicdomain is a trend that a lot of people, when dealing with PD material, seem stuck in Franchise Brain. They want The Thing as a discrete intellectual property, maintaining the shape of what came before - which is fine, though I find it disappointing. PD allows for its contents to be disseminated as part of collective culture, unbound from the strictures of who gets to use what or how they use it. You can just have a sailor named Popeye show up in something else, you don't need to make a New Popeye Thing Featuring Famous Character Popeye. PD detaches the ideas from the source so that those ideas are no longer tied down to a single specific execution or iteration. Does that make sense? It makes sense in my head. 

Anyway, all this is still just a starting point. Doubtlessly I will find some more that I've missed (or be reminded of them), and I've got some other PD goodies (Leslie Stone project included) in the works. In a world where the powers that be are trying to own information itself via Azathoth's idiot plagiarist brother, circulating the tapes like this brings at least a little peace of mind.